Appearances can be deceptive. We all know that. In the past, I have bought books purely on the strength of their attractive covers, despite being taught in the very early years never to judge a book in this manner. Then, in a reversal, and also in refusing to be baited any more by the red herring of the magnetic cover, I went out and purchased books with terribly bland covers only to be disappointed by their contents as well. After that I decided to be guided by the write-ups on the back and front covers, some of them by eminent personalities or prominent newspapers and magazines. That didn’t cut the mustard either, because I discovered that tastes differ.

As they say — to cite a rather extreme analogy — one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Well, maybe not that extreme, because we know that books can be poisonous too — to the mind. Thereafter, I started banking on the synopsis printed generally on the back cover; which is what a lot of sensible book buyers would do anyway. It kind of worked better in that it offered a chink, a small crack in the view, as to what lay between the covers. Apart from that, in all my years of book buying, I don’t think there is any other way of determining whether a book one has bought is going to be worth the money spent on it, until it’s been read to the end.

There are polls and best-seller lists of course, but those again are merely based on opinion where, once again, the meat and poison analogy kicks in. I mean, back then, millions bought MJ’s album Thriller; and millions didn’t! Millions, in my opinion, ought to have bought A Flock of Seagulls; not that many did. But that’s my opinion.

And in this way, via this analysis, I arrive in the city of Pune, India. I have moved on for the moment from judging books and music to observing humans. If I haven’t been terribly successful picking out great reads what chance have I of pointing a finger and saying so-and-so must be very wealthy while so-and-so has to be definitely classified under ‘needy’? Here, too, I am a victim of conditioning.

Pune, like many cities in India, is now home not merely to the Ambassador car and the Maruti models. All the big foreign brand names are cruising on wheels here. So when I see a Mercedes purring uncomplainingly over a road bump, I can safely assume its owner has pots of money; ditto, the Audi. One doesn’t have to be very astute to draw these conclusions, admittedly. I, too, am seated in a very capacious SUV parked beside the Merc and the Audi. However, the SUV is not and can never be mine. Impoverished writers, struggling to rub two cents together, don’t entertain notions of owning SUVs. I am merely a passenger taking a ride by invitation. We are all parked on the street beside the stall of the vada pao [an Indian snack made of potatoes and bread] vendor. This particular stall has been recommended and I can understand why. It is crowded. No, that’s a mild way of putting it. It would appear that half of Pune’s population has turned out to sample vada pao this midday. It is more than crowded. It is thronging. The vada pao man has runners who come up to the cars and take orders.

“Where is the man himself?” I ask.

I am invited to step out of the car. After pressing my way through a tight jam of snackers, I finally see him. A thin, rather emaciated figure wearing a stained checked shirt and a faded, frayed pair of trousers.

“Oh the poor man,” I say, “what an exhausting life, he looks like he could do with a day off.” “That man,” says my companion, “is richer than most of the people eating at his stall. He earns lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of rupees a day and pays a huge income tax each year.”

And I know, once again, I’ve read the signs wrong.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.